Nina Totenberg
Nina Totenberg is NPR's award-winning legal affairs correspondent. Her reports air regularly on NPR's critically acclaimed newsmagazines All Things Considered, Morning Edition, and Weekend Edition.
Totenberg's coverage of the Supreme Court and legal affairs has won her widespread recognition. She is often featured in documentaries — most recently RBG — that deal with issues before the court. As Newsweek put it, "The mainstays [of NPR] are Morning Edition and All Things Considered. But the creme de la creme is Nina Totenberg."
In 1991, her ground-breaking report about University of Oklahoma Law Professor Anita Hill's allegations of sexual harassment by Judge Clarence Thomas led the Senate Judiciary Committee to re-open Thomas's Supreme Court confirmation hearings to consider Hill's charges. NPR received the prestigious George Foster Peabody Award for its gavel-to-gavel coverage — anchored by Totenberg — of both the original hearings and the inquiry into Anita Hill's allegations, and for Totenberg's reports and exclusive interview with Hill.
That same coverage earned Totenberg additional awards, including the Long Island University George Polk Award for excellence in journalism; the Sigma Delta Chi Award from the Society of Professional Journalists for investigative reporting; the Carr Van Anda Award from the Scripps School of Journalism; and the prestigious Joan S. Barone Award for excellence in Washington-based national affairs/public policy reporting, which also acknowledged her coverage of Justice Thurgood Marshall's retirement.
Totenberg was named Broadcaster of the Year and honored with the 1998 Sol Taishoff Award for Excellence in Broadcasting from the National Press Foundation. She is the first radio journalist to receive the award. She is also the recipient of the American Judicature Society's first-ever award honoring a career body of work in the field of journalism and the law. In 1988, Totenberg won the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Silver Baton for her coverage of Supreme Court nominations. The jurors of the award stated, "Ms. Totenberg broke the story of Judge (Douglas) Ginsburg's use of marijuana, raising issues of changing social values and credibility with careful perspective under deadline pressure."
Totenberg has been honored seven times by the American Bar Association for continued excellence in legal reporting and has received more than two dozen honorary degrees. On a lighter note, Esquire magazine twice named her one of the "Women We Love."
A frequent contributor on TV shows, she has also written for major newspapers and periodicals — among them, The New York Times Magazine, The Harvard Law Review, The Christian Science Monitor, and New York Magazine, and others.
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Roe v. Wade and the constitutional right to abortion in the United States is now very much in doubt after Wednesday's historic arguments before the Supreme Court.
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The fate of abortion in the U.S. appears to be on shaky ground as a divided Supreme Court weighs a Mississippi law. A decision in the case is expected by summer. -
At issue is whether to reverse the court's nearly half-century-old decision, Roe v. Wade, and subsequent decisions declaring that women have a constitutional right to terminate a pregnancy.
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Abortion did not become illegal in most states until the mid to late 1800s. But by the 1960s, abortion, like childbirth, had become a safe procedure when performed by a doctor.
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The subject has, at times, divided the court's conservative majority and it has also at times embarrassed the court, as minority religious advisers have sometimes been excluded from the chamber.
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The argument will focus on whether this case can move forward at all because the government argues that for it to produce any of the evidence gathered 15 years ago would jeopardize national security.
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It's the first major gun case at the court since 2008, when the court ruled that the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms grants individuals the right to keep a gun at home for self-defense.
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The time long awaited by gun-rights advocates has come, as the conservative court examines how far a state may go in regulating an individual's right to carry a gun outside the home.
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Justices heard arguments in a case testing whether an elected community college board can censure one of its members.
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The Supreme Court heard arguments in a case involving a controversial Texas law that in effect bars abortions after six weeks of pregnancy, well before most women know they are pregnant.
